Take 2: Doublemint Twins Return to Marietta–in New Roles

Double your pleasure, double your fun.

If you are of a certain age, you can sing that sentence and finish the jingle that ran for decades on TV commercials for Doublemint gum.  

The song’s lyrics changed over the years, but one thing the Wrigley Co., now owned by Mars Inc., stuck with is the use of twins in the Doublemint commercials.

Two of them were kids in Marietta–identical girls. Their parents moved to Chicago in the mid-1970s, when the twins were 11.  One came back to Cobb more than 25 years ago, and her sister returned in 2005.

They are together again in midlife, back after successful careers and building families of their own. It wasn’t easy moving back from Chicago, twin Linda Puffer admits, but “it was more about perspective and gratitude instead of comparing. Initially it was a shocking change, but we’ve found wonderful things about this area.”

Linda’s husband, David Puffer, runs Flourish Antiques on Roswell Street. Puffer, who met his wife in Chicago, where he was a fashion photographer for more than 30 years, specializes in lighting restoration and sales.

Linda Puffer, now an interior design consultant, runs Flourish Interiors.

Second careers.  Double your fun.

“We are working together all the time,” Linda Puffer said. “We were in the same industry before. Now we’ve come full circle to be able to work together as a team.”

Linda was five when her family moved from Baltimore to Marietta, and six years later her father’s job took the family to Chicago. Linda and her twin, Lisa, were dancers in their teens.

“We were doing some work around Chicago, dancers mixed in with models, and the models said, ‘You guys should model,’ ” Linda Puffer said. “We were 16.

“We never dressed alike, but we thought the reason they were saying that was because we were identical twins, so we dressed alike and started going around to all the [modeling] agencies in Chicago. We felt so awkward.

“David Whitfield from a very nice agency took us aside and said, ‘You’ll get twin calls, there aren’t that many of them. You should change your last names and model independently.’ And so I went with Linda Ryan and Lisa went with Lisa Winters. Our maiden name was Yokubinas, which was a mouthful anyway.”

A few years later, Linda met David Puffer.  “I was very excited about seeing one of the top fashion photographers,” she remembers now. “We just clicked. He asked me to test.  I was over the moon excited.

“He had a lot of antiques in his office. Even then I had a love for design. I came back to show him my ideas, which normally would be just what I was going to wear and stuff.  Well, I had the whole background picked out. If there had been a bubble over David’s head it would have said something like, ‘This punk kid’s gonna tell me how to shoot this?’ ”

David remembers: “I was thinking, I don’t want anyone to tell me how to shoot this, but I do like this person. We always laugh about it now.

“She was very real, very genuine.  There was a pureness of her spirit.  It was love overnight.”

They got married the next year, in 1983. The chewing gum deal got started two years later.

As Linda tells it, a personal crisis had brought her back to her faith. Lisa, who had already moved back to Marietta, had a similar thing happen to her. “We started talking and realized we had both come to the same place within a week of each other. We started praying about working together.”

Linda flew to Atlanta and the sisters had photos shot together. Back in Chicago, her agent told her the Wrigley Co. was doing a nationwide search for a new set of twins.

“I hadn’t even printed up our twin shots yet,” Linda said. “My agent said he was not going to fly in Lisa for the first call, that I should just bring the slides. I walked into the casting office and there are all these twins.  They must have thought, ‘Who’s this singleton?’ ”

Two months later, she got a call from Wrigley, and they flew Lisa to Chicago.

“They had nine sets of twins, and they landed on us and another set. We did the first spot, which I still think is the best spot.  The pool spot.”

The pool spot went like this: The jingle begins. The twins are walking past a swimming pool.  They pop a couple of sticks of gum into their mouths.  Their hats blow off. Two guys in bathing suits catch them in mid air and return them.  The girls give them gum and stroll off.  Music fades.

“The director for that was a still photographer, and his lighting was beautiful,” Linda said.

“Still photographers tend to know lighting better,” added her husband, who should know. “When you bring that into cinematography you can get some beautiful commercials.  And that was a beautiful commercial.  It’s funny how that resonated with people who still remember the jingle and the girls and the whole thing.”

The sisters went on to do six Doublemint TV commercials that aired between 1985 and 1995. 

During that time, David Puffer, who was working for corporate clients such as Land’s End, Sears and Montgomery Ward, got a call from the BBDO ad agency. “They wanted me to shoot [still] photos of the Doublemint twins.  They hired me to do the magazine, billboard and shopping cart photos.  They had no idea [we were married] until I told them.”

The Wrigley Co. began selling Doublemint gum in 1914, according to the company’s Web site, and the ad campaigns with twins began in 1939. Many sets of twins have been used over the years, but the decade-long focus on Linda and Lisa was unusual.

In 2008, the company got away from the twins idea when it hired R&B singer Chris Brown to rework his song “Forever” into a Doublemint commercial. The spots began running in 2009 but were quickly suspended when Brown was arrested on a felony battery charge after allegedly hitting his girlfriend, the singer Rihanna.

The Puffers were long done with gum when that happened. While still in Chicago, David had eased out of photography, and Linda had done the same in modeling. They had a successful antiques business for many years on the city’s North Shore before moving back to Cobb in 2005.

“Linda’s family (father, step-mother, mother, two sisters) is here, and we felt called to come here,” David said.

Still, leaving deep-dish pizza for the Deep South wasn’t easy.

“You leave your adult children. You leave the place you spent your whole career, leave a city that you love. I can tell you about every alleyway in downtown Chicago. I was a delivery boy in high school.  It’s part of me.”

They spent a year selling at antique malls before finding a storefront of their own on the Marietta Square, across from the Marietta Pizza Company. Flourish moved into its current spot just west of the square at 515 Roswell Street two years ago.

Linda Puffer spent time here working for Calico Home before going out on her own.

Cobb has replaced the Cubs.

“It’s really no different wherever you are,” David Puffer said. “A lot of it’s in your head as far as memories and reminiscing and experiences of life. We’ve come to see those opportunities are very much here.

“We just had to have our eyes open to see them. That’s what was hard because you’re so foreign to everything you don’t know where to go or what to do, and so you’re starting to compare. It can rob you of the joy.

“I thank God for really taking me through that. But I knew we were supposed to come and of course it’s been great. We’ve come to really love it and love the people.”